May We Be Forgiven

cries.”
    As lightning is crashing around me and we’re climbing a hill into a dark castle, I’m turning and trying to crawl out of my car and into hers. Suddenly strobe lights are flashing and, as in some slow-motion Marx Brothers movie, I’m on my hands and knees on top of the train car. The train is heading straight for the closed door of the castle, and right before it hits, the train turns sharply and I am thrown overboard, banging into a wall, reaching out and grabbing at anything for balance, worried about landing on the third rail—if there is such a thing in a haunted house. And then it all stops. It’s pitch-dark. “Don’t move,” we hear a voice overhead. Ashley is still crying, sobbing in the dark. A minute later, the Haunted House is flooded with bright fluorescent light; every secret of the night is revealed—the lousy papier-mâché walls, the cheaply strung-together skeletons suspended on wire hangers, the yellow and purple glow-in-the-dark paint on everything.
    “What the fuck,” the ride operator says, coming down the tracks.
    “Sorry,” I say.
    “Sorry, shmorry,” he says to me.
    “The little girl was crying.”
    “Are you all right, sweetheart?” the operator asks Ashley, genuinely concerned. “Is anybody injured?”
    We all shake our heads. “We’re all right.”
    The operator grabs a tow rope at the front of the train and pulls us all down the tracks, bending his head at the front doors, and we bang out into the daylight .
    “You sure you’re all okay?”
    “As okay as we can be, given the circumstances,” I say. I hand the guy twenty bucks. I’m not exactly sure why, but it feels necessary.
    “Let’s go home,” I say to the children, herding them to the parking lot.
    “It was all good until we got to the Haunted House,” Nate says.
    “It was good,” I say.
    For dinner we have Jane’s spaghetti sauce from the freezer.
    “I love Mom’s spaghetti,” Ashley says.
    “Great,” I say, worried that there are only two more containers in the freezer and they’re going to have to last a lifetime. I’m wondering if spaghetti sauce can be cloned. If we save a sample or take a swab of Jane’s sauce, can someone make more?
    Spaghetti and frozen broccoli and cream soda and Sara Lee pound cake. You would almost think things are under control.
    The cat walks by, flicking her tail at my ankles under the table. Ashley gets up and shows me the cabinet where forty cans of cat food are stacked in neat order.
    “She likes the salmon the best,” Ashley says.

    A fter dinner I take the children back to the hospital. Everything is slightly more hushed; the ICU has a dimmed glow-in-the-dark quality. The large space is divided into eight glass-walled rooms, of which six are occupied.
    “Anything?” I ask the nurse.
    She shakes her head. “Nothing.”
    The children visit with their mother. Nathaniel has brought a paper he wrote for school. He reads it aloud to her and then asks if she thinks it needs something more. He waits for an answer. The ventilator breathes its mechanical breath. After he reads the paper, he tells her about the amusement park, he tells her about a boy at school that apparently she already knows a lot about, he tells her that he’s calculated that by the time he’s ready to start college it will cost about seventy-five thousand dollars a year and that by the time Ashley is ready to start it will be more than eighty. He tells her he loves her.
    Ashley rubs her mother’s feet. “Does that feel good?” she asks, smoothing cream over her toes and up her ankles. “Maybe tomorrow I can bring polish from home and do your nails.”
    Later, I walk through the house, turning out lights. It’s nearly midnight. Ashley is in her room, playing with her old toys; all the dolls from her shelves are down on the floor, and she’s in the middle.
    “Time for bed,” I say.
    “In a minute,” she says.
    Nate is down the hall, in his parents’ room, splayed out on their bed asleep and fully clothed. Tessie is with him, her head on the pillow, filling in for Jane.

    I n the morning, a van pulls up outside. A man gets out, unloads six boxes. From inside I watch him carry them one by one to the front door. At first I’m thinking it’s a box bomb delivered by the surviving relatives of the family George killed. But there’s something so methodical, so painstaking about the way this guy works that clearly he’s a professional of another sort. The last thing out of